OP's pretty clearly not a seasoned programmer or he would know the difference between a program and an operating system. Very likely he would know the difference between a batch language and a scripting or programming language even.

However, Perl is a pretty good language for teaching people many programming fundamentals (and pretty seriously cools as well). It is rather more forgiving than the more strongly typed languages and more quietly powerful (for some definition of powerful) than the many variants of Basic.

So even for people with green scaly skin that live under a bridge, Perl is a pretty good place to learn something about what a programming language is and does.